WatchSeeLookView At The LFF 2019 - The Aeronauts

Up, up and way in my beautiful, my beautiful ballooooooon….

The Aeronauts
Dir. Tom Harper / Dur. 101 mins / Country. USA
Festival Strand:- The Mayor Of London’s Gala
In A Nutshell:- High flying ballooning adventure based on real life events

The Good:- Based on real life attempts to break ballooning altitude records combined with a desire to legitimise the new science of meteorology, Harper’s film is na absolute feats for the eyes. Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones are on fine form accompanied by a solid supporting cast of British stalwarts (Tom Courtenay, Anne Reid, Rebecca Front, Tin McInnerney). The aerial sequences truly deserve to be seen on a big screen and are properly tense and exciting whilst simultaneously provoking an almost childlike sense of wonder. Also, on a purely personal note, I always enjoy seeing places that I’ve known since a child on screen (hell, Greenwich Park and Observatory) 

The Bad:- It is certainly one of the most Hollywood of the films I’ve been to see at the festival. Outside of the ballooning scenes, the flashbacks / framing story is fairly pedestrian. It’s the sort of story we’ve seen many times times before and doesn’t particularly offer anything new - it even has the grudging slow hand clap of the main character’s rival during a triumphal scene. It’s only really the calibre of the cast that carries these us through these scenes.

The Verdict:- It’s certainly a film that is worth seeing on the big screen for the spectacle and tension of the ballooning scenes. I was gripped all the way through these scenes. The rest of the story is a little pedestrian but that doesn’t detract from a fun and exciting adventure film.

The Venue / Intro / Q&A:- Back at the custom-built Embankment Garden Cinema for this oje. No intro or Q&A sadly for this one and another one that I’d managed to pick with subtitles again. Thinking about it, I probably wouldn't go to this kind of big budget fare at the festival again - much as I enjoyed it, I’d rather be finding new and possibly odd little films that I’m less likely to be able to see at the multiplex.